A few days late but stacked with excellence, here is your collection of May’s absolute jams. For optimal ease of consumption, you’ll find it here in three forms: a 12-track downloadable zip of the month’s best free MP3s, a 15-song Spotify playlist of May’s finest Spotify-enabled tracks, and to close it out, a 46-track Soundcloud set of the essential songs you ought to have in your ears and under your belt before moving your mind onto June. For your weekend:

This Spotify version overlaps greatly, though it leads with Savages’ “No Face” and includes excellent electronica via Jon Hopkins and Boards Of Canada, which are strong and salient differentiating factors. Dig:

And for those of you with three-and-a-half hours to burn, here’s the master set:

If any of these songs have struck your fancy, this hyperlinked list of what we’re working with is your syllabus for further study: